Laughing in the Dark

It is often the arts, serious or satirical, that expose the tragic absurdity of repressive leadership. And the more repressive Donald Trump's policies become, the more demand there will be for artists who oppose him.

LONDON – As a former Soviet citizen, I can tell you: it’s never a good sign for a political system when artists start speaking out against it. And when their statements visibly strike a nerve, chances are that the system is sick.

In a democracy, art can simply be ignored. Of course, one can appreciate culture, but that is a matter of choice, not necessity. Indifference is a luxury afforded to those whose freedoms are well protected. When those freedoms are threatened, however, art becomes a critical line of defense. The United States is learning that lesson today.

In just over a month, President Donald Trump has changed the rules of US politics – and not for the better. If the facts contradict his administration’s line – or, worse, suggest that he isn’t popular – he denounces the journalists who report them as purveyors of “fake news” and an “enemy” of the American people.

@Jose- I appreciate and respect your comment. Jean Paul Satre visiting Portugal just after the war was shocked by the conditions he found there.
Sir, you and I know that Portugal was never 'primitive'. The word 'Caste' for English comes from Portuguese. Yet, we can't say the Iberian peninsula- unlike Eighteenth Century Poland or Germany- was a truly 'caste' society.

Sir, Russian peasants and kulaks did burn and loot the Manors of the Aristocracy from 1916 onward. This does not mean they were primitive. They were rational.
Lenin had previously identified the (Henry Georgist) claim that Nationalisation of Land as the terminus ad quem of the Bourgeois Social project.
From the time of Gogol- or rather Pushkin who gave him the theme of 'Dead Souls' - this idiocy had blindly burgeoned and, in Ostrovsky and Chekhov, assumed the status of irrefragable therapeutic axioms.

Lenin did not transfer any land to the peasants. He pretended his, Red in rapine, hordes were protecting the wannabe kulak's ill gotten gains, but we all know how that story ended. First a 'Scissors crisis' and then, the Stalinist solution to the 'Hairy Ball theorem'- viz chop off heads to trim a cowlick.
Portugal was destroyed by its overseas Empire. It was never 'primitive' yet it has no great writer or poet or composer at all.
It has singers- Gallician Saudosismo outwears even the optimism of Lisbon's Earthquake- but singers even Economists like Salazar can't wholly suborn to stupidity.
Salazar was an Economist.

Nina L. Khrushcheva draws her first hand experience as a former Soviet citizen for a situation when artists run afoul of a political system. A Soviet artist was so beholden to state subsidy, that the government's interference in the arts was a given. Authorities could deny someone, who displeased them, membership in the official unions that provided gallery space, publishing outlets and coverage in state-controlled press, better housing etc. At worst dissident artists were denounced as traitors, and driven into foreign or Siberian exile.
In a democracy art is personal preference, not a "necessity" and artists don't have to worry about offending standards and the state's power to curb. People can be indifferent to art, because they are free to choose what they like. But when these freedoms come under threat, "art becomes a critical line of defense." it's "never a good sign" for the political elite when artists start criticising them. They are especially thin-skinned, when scathing remarks "visibly strike a nerve," and that "the system is sick."
The US is "learning that lesson," as its "pillars of democracy" have come under attack. Trump has since his election drawn criticism for his controversial decisions and policies, sparking angry protests and inspiring a range of satirical themes on TV and in media outlets. As "artists are stepping in" the author lays out a list of protest campaigns they stage, together with the Museum of Modern Art, the film and the fashion world etc. Trump is "a longtime Hollywood hanger-on" and pays more attention to what the entertainment world says about him than what mainstream media do.
Indeed, there is a strong relationship between arts and politics, as they both project power. It explains "why Russia’s autocratic leaders have always tried to keep artists on a short leash." Joseph Stalin was eager to persuade Osip Mandelstam, "the celebrated anti-Kremlin poet Osip Mandelstam to write him an ode." His viciously sarcastic poem was a mastarpiece on Stalinist paranoia, which led to his arrest and later death in the Gulag.
Putin understands the soft power that arts exert over ordinary people. He was pleased that the Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from his US exile. Bowing to power the novelist became more nationalistic and supported Putin, who also hosted a number of Western artists and film stars, and even granted Steven Seagal and Gérard Depardieu Russian citizenship.
Putin has been "quick to eliminate those whose message he does not like," and let the 1990s satirical television show Puppets "canceled almost immediately after /he/ entered the Kremlin." He disapproved of him being likened to "Little Zaches, the ugly, evil, and self-important dwarf from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s grotesque fairy tale."
The author sees Trump as a "novice autocrat" who seeks to "emulate his Russian role model." However his "attempts to silence his critics have been clumsy," because he "has not amassed sufficient power to quash every cultural work and institution that criticizes him. If he had, he probably would have already canceled the comedy show Saturday Night Live, which he condemns regularly." In this regard the First Amendment is still robust, and most Americans will fight tooth and nail to defend it. Finally, "it is often the arts, serious or satirical, that expose the tragic absurdity of repressive leadership. And the worse Trump behaves, the more demand there will be for artists who oppose him. Saturday Night Live’s ratings are at a six-year high." Trump's larger-than-life ego may well be his Achilles heel.

Is this the most foolish sentence ever written?
' As a former Soviet citizen, I can tell you: it’s never a good sign for a political system when artists start speaking out against it.'
Which artists spoke out against Lenin or Stalin or Kruschev? They were killed before they could speak out or silenced in some other way. Was the political system they presided over healthy? Is that what this lady thinks?
In a democracy, art can be ignored if it has no influence- J.H Prynne's poetry didn't shake the Thatcher Govt- but it can't be ignored if it is popular and well executed- Spitting Image did hurt Thatcher.

Is it true that 'when freedoms are threatened, art becomes a critical line of defense'? Nope. The Law is a critical line of defense. Art isn't. That's the lesson the U.S was founded upon and even recent immigrants to the U.S are able to learn that lesson again today because Artists have had zero impact whereas the Court's have had 100 percent impact.

The US constitution is based on checks and balances. Trump can denounce anybody he likes till he is blue in the face. He can even emulate 'Pussy Riot' and engage in performance art in order to attack those he doesn't like. But if he acts in an illegal or unconstitutional manner the Judges- not the artists- will stop him dead in his tracks.

The author may think that Mandelstam or Pasternak or Bulgakov or Tsvetaeva had some counter-veiling power against the Kremlin. They did not. Letting Solzhenitsyn and Sinyavsky and Bukovsky out of the country may have been a mistake. But it was the 'stabilisation of the cadres' in the early Sixties which sealed the doom of the System. Art may indeed have played a leavening role after that- more especially amongst the children of the nomenklatura- but it was the incentive incompatibility of the system which brought it down.
This lady is a Professor at the New School. She thinks an American President who 'amasses enough power' can get Saturday Night Live cancelled. Could someone please take her aside and explain the American constitution to her? Since she is so highly cultured, the task had better be delegated to a suitably avant garde artist. I suggest Yakov Smirnoff. 'In Amerika the Judges can cancel the President's executive orders. In Soviet Union, Mandelstam can bring down Stalin!' What? Back in the Eighties, people thought that sort of stuff was hilarious.

OMG. Just realised. The author is actually Yakov Smirnof! Always wondered what happened to him. Now we know.

Vivek, again I mostly agree with you, but I think you are not taking into consideration two things.

Regarding Lenin, well Romanov Russia was feudal, based on servitude, a very brutal primitive society. Russia wasn't France or Germany or England, they were a primitive country, which explain many of the action took by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Khrushchev was the one that denounced Stalin, and most of the opposition he faced wasn't coming from reformers butt by Stalinists. So even if he wanted to open up the country more, he would probably be deposed.

Were they perfect leaders, for sure they were not, but in my book they stand tall, and should be respected for what they achieved, they clearly were much better leaders than most of the common western ones.

@Curtius. 'Constructive thoughts' don't exist. Gedanken do. Scientific Research Programs are based on the latter. Criticism is a different matter. Critics we shall always have with us because there are more monks than Reason.

@Jose, Some, like Gorbachov, thought the NEP was an expression of the 'real' Lenin who was willing to feather-bed 'Artists', shielding them from the caprices of the market, in a manner that pure Capitalism, notoriously, refused to do. However, Lenin only supported those Arts which helped dissolve the autochthonous (Narodnik) cultural traditions of the people and that too for a tactical reason.
Stalin's theory of nationalities and his philosophy of language did, I admit, help 'jadidi' or other progressive cultural elements in 'subject' populations but, by then, Stalin had perfected the tools of oppression. Kruschev is neither here nor there- being a mercurial fool. Brezhnev's stabilisation of the cadres did translate- especially for 'subject' peoples- into a sort of subsidised ethnographic Parnassus- at least for the well connected. However, from the Sixties onward, European and American Academia could better cater to the haut bourgeois tastes of a, hothouse culture, nomenklatura which flourished equally in Post Colonial Capitals.
The trouble with that generation of artists is that they lived too long and thus became objects of ridicule to those who came of age in the Eighties.

Kruscheva thinks that the process of co-optation Lenin initiated must have corresponded to some genuine value or threat that artists posed. This is not the case. These weren't really artists in that they had no organic link to anything and thus embodied no countervailing power or potential.

On the contrary, the bankruptcy of the artists was deliberately curated to show that all historical alternatives to the Bolsehvik path had always been infantile. I recall reading Terz's translation of a Chechen poem and being moved to tears. Later, Chechnya became a byword for Terror and Gangsterism- a far cry from the chivalry of Imam Shamil (who wasn't Chechen). Meanwhile Terz in Paris proved to have no great wisdom to impart. This was a Parnassianism which could never have gained any sort of salience save for the fact of its complicity in its own oppression. It failed the test of the market.

Artists can be 'moral entrepreneurs'. They are welcome, in a market economy, to strike more or less antagonomic poses- till one clicks with the public and the Advertising Industry rushes in to exploit the gap in the market. This in turn alerts the P.R industry which is linked to K Street and thus to Congress. This transmission mechanism does not depend on the Artist qua Artist any more than Schumpeterian Creative Destruction depends on the Entrepreneur qua Entrepreneur. On the contrary, the interchangability and noncontextuality of the agent of change means their inwardness is less, not more, important than that of anyone else.
Thus the last thing we need now is Movie Stars talking nonsense about Trump. Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi helped Nixon- it didn't hurt him. Pussy riot was a gift to Putin.
The Law, and nothing but the Law, is the proper defence of Freedom. Any collective choice mechanism will have pathologies. Neither artists nor moral entrepreneurs have any salience in correcting this. The Founding Fathers could have taken the path of Condorcet and Borda. They chose not to and chose well.

New Comment

Pin comment to this paragraph

After posting your comment, you’ll have a ten-minute window to make any edits. Please note that we moderate comments to ensure the conversation remains topically relevant. We appreciate well-informed comments and welcome your criticism and insight. Please be civil and avoid name-calling and ad hominem remarks.

Log in/Register

Please log in or register to continue. Registration is free and requires only your email address.

Log in

Register

Emailrequired

PasswordrequiredRemember me?

Please enter your email address and click on the reset-password button. If your email exists in our system, we'll send you an email with a link to reset your password. Please note that the link will expire twenty-four hours after the email is sent. If you can't find this email, please check your spam folder.